Depiction of Death as a Means of Relief from Trauma in Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tale The Little Match Girl

ABSTRACT

Death, in congruence with its painful truth, is generally used as a means to depict fear and sorrow. But in the fairy tale The Little Match Girl, Hans Christian Andersen has used the concept of death as a way of obtaining solace from the troubles and traumas faced by the protagonists, with the assurance of a better future in the afterlife. In this sense, the role of death is reversed from darkness to light. But the darkness in the tales has not been mitigated, but simply passed over from death to life itself. The harbinger of pain and trauma, in this sense, is not death, but life itself, for the protagonists, though their sufferings and situations differ. Going by the textual sense, the endings in the tales have given a halo of solace to the protagonists, but still, the authenticity of them attaining peace and relief needs to be contemplated upon, even in terms of the mental satisfaction it serves for the readers. In this paper, an attempt has been made to study the idea of death as a hope for happiness, in light of Northrop Frye concept of Tragic and Comic Vision in a Myth, given in his essay The Archetypes of Literature, published in The Kenyon Review in 1951. The study also aims to review the protagonists personal and socio-cultural aspects that gave rise to physical and emotional traumas with no other viable means of escape except death, whether by choice or under the power of fate.

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